With growing demand for data services such as wireless internet, VoIP and on-demand connectivity, Volubill’s Real-time Data Charging solution enables service providers to offer services that are revenue-assured, profit-optimal and economically accessible to all in the market, by:

• Launching and delivering services segmented by characteristics such as quota, time, bandwidth, application, traffic use, location, payment method and customer loyalty – makes data services innovative, competitive and economically accessible by a larger user market.
• Offering data services to pre-pay, post-pay, on-demand and voucher customers – for convergent but revenue assured comprehensive market offering.
• Eliminating revenue leakage and fraud by accounting for all traffic in real-time.
• Initiating in-line (pop-up/redirect), on-line (self-care) and off-line (messaging) advice-of-charge, service advice and service status dialogue with users – for efficient and effective revenue collection, improved customer experience and personalised service delivery.

This is achieved by combining the activities of traffic identification, usage monitoring, session control and/or service delivery with customer functions such as account balance management and user profile in real-time for end-to-end control, charging and delivery of innovative data services.

Volubill’s Real-time Data Charging solution is designed to fulfil a number of common roles to support the evolving requirements and existing investments of network operators and service providers:

• End-to-end real-time revenue management solution for data services with; in-line service session control and deep packet inspection (DPI) options; on-line balance management, electronic customer billing, service modelling, accounts receivable, voucher management, dialogue management, customer care/self care and real-time rating options.
• Online Charging System (OCS) according to 3GPP standards including integration to Volubill’s Policy & Charging Resource Function (PCRF) and Usage Policy Management solution.
• Advanced and Intelligent AAA (or integration too) for Broadband Operator and ISPs
• Active mediation of data, application and content usage with off-board accounts and balances located in legacy IN, OSS and BSS systems
• CSN-level WiMAX data charging and revenue management solution

• Charging and control over multiple disparate and simultaneous sessions per user
• Quota allocation and re-allocation to a user service session level
• Dynamic service definition including time, data volume, application, throughput, roaming, location, credit status, usage units, etc
• Session termination, hold and redirection
• In-line, on-line and off-line dialogue management
• Data and process correlation between disparate service controllers and platforms (AAA, SDP, DPI, GGSN/PDSN, etc)
• Traffic identification using in-built Deep Packet Inspection (Streaming, P2P, VoIP, messaging, browsing, download and multi-media) and Shallow Inspection (port, destination, protocol) capabilities
• On-board rating, balance management, account management, partner accounts, account hierarchy, self-care, CRM, accounts receivable, voucher management, credit payment and electronic billing options
• Active real-time mediation with off-board IN, Billing and CRM systems for balance management, real-time rating and user account look-up
• 3GPP/2 compliant interfaces including full-IMS support, RADIUS, GTP’ and Diameter interfaces
• Open standard provisioning interfaces (Web Services, SOAP & CORBA) and protocol interfaces for function outsourcing
• High-availability and speeds to support multi-gigabyte carrier networks. Distributed, redundancy-enabled and scalable architecture
• Off-the-shelf network and system plug-ins
• UDR/CDR generation for post-event mediation and business intelligence reporting

To fulfil a number of different roles, suit existing operator system investments and meet evolving business models Volubill’s Real-time Data Charging solution is a modular solution delivered using Volubill’s CHARGE-IT product suite (see Figure 1). Designed specially for high-speed implementation, low cost of ownership and targeted application deployments.

• CHARGE-IT Service Controller (SC)
  The Service Controller is an in-line network router based component designed to inspect traffic, control user sessions and inject dialogue to users. Based on service definitions it generates charging activities based on user usage activities and characteristics such as volume, elapse time, application identification, location change, AAA activities etc. It can act on internal and external events to terminate, hold or redirect/inject dialogue into user sessions. It is network agnostic and supports packet mobile, WiMAX, ISP and wireline environments.
  
  
• CHARGE-IT Dynamic Charging Platform (DCP)
  The Dynamic Charging Platform manages user balances and accounts (pre-pay, post-pay, credit-cards, vouchers, etc) in real-time. It applies charges, distributes service quotas, responds to policy notices and provides service authorisation to service controllers, delivery platforms and network gateways. It is user oriented and collates simultaneous user activities and sessions to provide holistic user account control and personalisation.
  
  The Dynamic Charging Platform can actively mediate with external balance and billing solutions or employ its on-board customer account management functionality for end-to-end customer revenue management.
  
  
• Optional integrated Usage Policy Management
  Volubill’s Real-time Charging Solutions can come pre-integrated with Volubill’s Usage Policy Management solution. This is also delivered by Volubill’s CHARGE-IT product suite. It offers service providers the benefits of a complete policy and charging solution that together ensures optimal network capacity cost management and service delivery. Volubill’s Usage Policy Management solution provides policy decisions and enforcement capabilities such as bandwidth shaping and QoS enforcement for fair usage management, capacity re-distribution, service prioritisation, on-demand through-put and peak-load management.
  
  Through a modular product, adapter and standardisation approach, its Usage Policy Management solution can work in tandem with existing policy enforcement, policy management systems and real-time charging/OSS/BSS systems to ensure operators are able to reuse existing investments and lower the total cost of ownership.
  
  
  Figure 1 – Real-time Data Charging Ecosystem

Volubill’s Real-time Data Charging solution supports the following business models:

• Charging by destination, time, data cap, message, application (e.g. P2P), VAS (e.g. VoIP, Video), Premium SMS, MMS, MMS Contents, time-band, personalisation, user payment method and combinations thereof (but not limited too).
• Metering based on flat-subscription, event, session, throughput, pre-priced content and QoS levels
• Pre-pay, post-pay, voucher and on-demand user convergence
• Partner, promotional or advertising based subsidisation
• Loyalty, points and history based rating and charging
• Account hierarchy (including parent-child) and enterprise-employee management
• White-labelling, multi-subsidiary and wholesale management

Volubill’s Real-time Data Charging solution provides operators the following benefits:

• A network-grade data charging solution, with traffic awareness (DPI), network gateway adapters and user-level session control capabilities.
• A modular capability to support existing investments in network and B/OSS infrastructure while also enabling the lowest cost of ownership through meeting targeted requirements.
• 3GPP/2 Online Charging System (OCS) Compliant with off-the-shelf network adapters.
• Extends to support comprehensive policy management and enforcement facilities.
• Delivered in productised fashion with best-practise configurations for swift time-to-market requirements.
• Multi-network, multi-vendor and multi-service compliant to enable holistic and convergent subscriber service charging.
• Enables service leadership, innovation and profitability.